


but you’ve gone somewhere deeper

by ninemoons42



Category: Captain America (Movies), Captain America - All Media Types
Genre: Blow Jobs, Body Worship, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Hurt Steve Rogers, Introspection, Kissing, M/M, Making Out, Mild Blood, Mild Hurt/Comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-17
Updated: 2015-02-17
Packaged: 2018-03-13 11:22:42
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3379694
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve's been injured and he's been confined to the Tower for a few days, and Bucky finds a way to make him feel better.</p>
            </blockquote>





	but you’ve gone somewhere deeper

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from Bastille's "Oblivion", which is definitely a Steve/Bucky song with a bullet.

“Steve.”

He sees the shift of those shoulders. The lines of bandages wrapped around and around Steve’s right arm. No ordinary flesh wounds, those. Magical, or at least the weapon that inflicted them had been. Bucky had personally seen to that blade’s destruction: he’d dropped it into the most corrosive substances JARVIS could hunt down, and then he’d crushed it into dust and crystalline shards with his left hand.

The wound is still open, Bucky knows. Steve bleeds. Sluggish red lines, slowly expanding. He needs to go up to Bruce in the infirmary every few hours. The serum is doing its job - Steve is nowhere near death’s door - but Steve’s bleeding, and Bucky is torn.

He wants to stay. But he can’t - he’s anxious, he’s antsy, he wants to keep the appointments he’s made. A therapy session. A meal with some of Sam’s veterans. 

Bucky, too, has to see to his own healing. Picking up the pieces of his scattered mind, his scattered history, his scattered heart.

Now Bucky takes a tentative step closer to the man sitting next to the window. Steve sits in that armchair when he’s not going to or coming from the infirmary. A heap of blankets, a handful of books - but mostly, as far as Bucky can see, Steve is just - there. 

If not for Steve he’d have nowhere and no one to come back to at all. Steve is the anchor. Steve is the linchpin. Steve is the red thread through the wrecked labyrinth landscape of his mind. He stays because he needs Steve like he needs to breathe and like he needs to remember his own name - the name that he remembers because Steve gave it back to him. On the causeway, on the DC streets, and now - here. 

He needs to stay and he wants to stay. 

But right now he also has to leave, even if it’s just for a few hours.

More movement in the armchair. Steve is turning. Looking at him. 

Bucky thinks he’s the only one who notices the silver strands in Steve’s hair, the telltale colorless lines. Time passes for Steve, too. 

Passes like slow seconds, one long hour after another, one endless year after another.

Bucky tries to speak lightly. “The guys want to get pizza and hot dogs. I might take them to that place you and Clint pointed out last week. Can - can I bring something back for you?”

Steve smiles, gentle and pained. “Thanks, Buck. Whatever you like.”

Bucky takes a step forward. Checks himself.

He says, “See you later.”

No response.

The elevator bears him down.

“Look after him, JARVIS,” Bucky whispers, and he doesn’t wait for Stark’s AI to respond - he squares his shoulders and swallows his fears, and ventures out into the world.

*

He doesn’t come back until later that evening. Too many unexpected encounters. Kate Bishop out and about with Clint’s dog _and_ Natasha’s cat. Jane Foster and Betty Ross, hands sticky with chocolate candy and too-sweet popcorn. One instance of being stopped by stooped old women, who saluted him with shaking hands, whose hands he held gently in his own as they whispered assurances.

Bucky still feels like an impostor, some days. Sam is trying to talk him out of it. Clint and Natasha know about his feeling that way. 

Steve does, too.

And when Bucky comes back up to Steve’s floor, to their floor, Steve is no longer in the armchair.

He’s about to begin a search of the rooms when the elevator chime sounds again, and he turns, and the red stains on Steve’s bandages are too bright.

“Bucky,” Steve says, and that’s all Bucky needs to hear: all the whip and spurs he has ever really listened to in his life. Listened _for_.

He reaches out for Steve’s hand. Pulls Steve closer. He whispers into Steve’s hair. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, but Steve must understand him, because Steve says his name again, and now it’s Steve who’s pulling, Steve who’s hanging on to Bucky, and Bucky plants his feet and holds Steve as tightly as he dares.

A wet spot grows on the collar of Bucky’s shirt. He continues to murmur to Steve. “I’m here.”

“Thank you.” 

When Steve pulls away, he’s wincing, and Bucky feels a muscle clench in his jaw, but he says nothing. Only stops Steve when Steve seems to head back toward the armchair. “Come with me.”

“Can’t go anywhere, Bucky.”

“Come on.” 

The bed is still unmade from when Bucky’d fallen into it only to rise, to pace, to do battle with his nightmares, again and again. The sheets smell like fever-dreams and the pillows have been pounded flat, but Steve falls willingly and Bucky falls in after him. 

Pushing and pulling, the two of them trying to get themselves situated, and Bucky doesn’t complain when he finds out Steve wants to be the big spoon - though he does insist: “On your left side. Bruce will kill me if he finds out you aggravated that damn slash.”

An answering grunt. 

Bucky shifts his left arm surreptitiously, trying to find a position where it’s neither too heavy on him nor in anyone’s way, and then Steve says, so softly that Bucky would have missed it without his own enhanced senses, “Thank you.”

It makes him smile. It makes him kiss the nearest part of Steve he can reach. He can feel the pulse in Steve’s wrist. Steve is alive and Steve will eventually be all right. If Bucky has anything now resembling pure faith, that which comes only from himself, that’s what he believes in. He desperately wanted to believe, when they were younger, when Steve spent so much time teetering on the precipices of life - getting into fights and starting them, making sure everyone got a fair deal, giving pieces of himself so freely - all that coupled with death snatching at him, over and over again.

And then World War II had come and Bucky found himself in the mud and amidst the flying bullets, the blood and the mud and the sour stench of fear, and Steve came to rescue him and then Bucky believed. 

Now Bucky’s trying to pick that belief back up. Snatched away over and over again, in ice and drugging numb and pain - but now Bucky’s got the chance to pick that faith back up and - oh look, he has a metal hand now, and he can hold on to things with it, and he’ll hold on to that faith.

He turns, now, and he catches a question on Steve’s mouth. One kiss turns into another, and another, and another. When he holds on to Steve he does so carefully, even as they topple over together, even as Steve finds himself flat on his back. Bucky doesn’t stop kissing him. Steve does the opposite of pushing him away.

Necessary questions. “Can I?” Bucky pulls at the hems of Steve’s shirt. Steve’s been wearing these clothes for a few days now. He’s been covered up. Bucky doesn’t want him covered up right now. He wants to see Steve. See the life in him, life that means light in his eyes and, yes, blood on bandages too.

Soft sounds all around - Bucky thinks, half-dazed, that some of them must be his, and some of them must be Steve’s. Old and new feelings at the same time; flashes of memory and desperate wishing and ice-dreams. Bucky kisses a path down Steve’s throat, Steve’s shoulders. Left, and a kiss brushed against the skin over Steve’s heart. 

Right, gently. The boundary between Steve’s skin and those stained bandages. The smell of iron and copper. He’d dealt with the weapon, he reminds himself, and the others had dealt with Steve’s assailant, and now all that’s left is the need to heal. The time to do so.

He can’t exactly say the same for himself, not Bucky, not with HYDRA still at large and lurking and leveraging. He won’t stop. The others will help him. And he’ll have Steve.

That’s for later. For tomorrow. He kisses Steve again, and lets Steve take control of this kiss, until Steve attempts to flip them over - and then Bucky pulls back. Shakes his head. 

“Bucky,” Steve slurs, sweet drunken whisper.

Bucky hushes him with a finger over his lips. Takes that finger away, seals their mouths together again. Kissing until light-headedness sinks in - and still Steve sighs and clings and Bucky has no intentions of cutting this short. He wants the opposite, actually. He wants to take his time.

Steve talks to him, now, and this is better than that wan silence, than those blank stares: and Bucky goes where Steve asks him to go. Kiss and lick and bite. The marks will fade as they all do. But seeing those wet circles, those brief flowering bruises, that does something to Bucky. 

The words tail off into sweet welcome shock and silence when Bucky finally focuses on Steve’s cock.

Here, too, Steve’s so vital. Musk and sweat and pre-cum. Bucky relaxes his throat, and Steve keens, and Bucky almost thinks he’d be able to taste the hot throb of Steve’s blood, Steve’s pulse, in the skin against his tongue. 

Something tugs at Bucky’s hair. He looks up.

Steve is shaking his head, frantically. “I can’t,” is all he says. “So good. So close. Bucky please.”

Bucky smiles, or tries to, because he doesn’t want to pull off. He’s filled up with the taste of Steve, the heat of Steve. 

He watches Steve’s head thump back into the pillows.

He lets up, then, breaks suction and takes a ragged breath in. Just enough of a tattered whisper to say, “Don’t hold back.” And down again: all the way down, Steve hitting the back of his throat. 

Steve cries out, once, and then breaks: and Bucky drinks him down, eagerly.

He comes up for air. Wipes his mouth with the back of his hand.

Steve reaches for him, and the words are ragged quiet. “What about you?”

Bucky smiles. Shakes his head. “Call it an IOU. Sure I’ll find a way to collect.”

“Can I ask what brought that on?”

Bucky kisses him. “You’ll be all right.”

He believes.

**Author's Note:**

> I am also on [tumblr](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/).


End file.
